2012 •

Large Scale SWNTs Infrared Antenna for Energy Harvesting Application

Abstract

Large scale single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) assembly method is demonstrated to fabricate infrared (IR) antenna for energy harvesting application. A template guided fluidic assembly process has been employed to assemble and integrate SWNTs because of its directed, robust and precisely controllable advantages. A horizontally aligned SWNTs bundles with high density are required to harvest energy from IR radiation directly. Since the humidity of the environment during assembly process plays a key role on the assembly of SWNTs, it is critical to control the humidity. For the highly aligned dense SWNTs assembly, controllable drying process has been developed to increase the yield of highly dense SWNTs assembly over large arrays. Based on dying process and humidity control system, SWNTs have been assembled to create IR antenna operating in the microwave frequency regime. The assembled SWNTs bundles are efficient transport of carriers upon excitation by IR light. The proposed SWNTs-based IR antenna shows that aligned SWNTs bundles have a high sensitivity to IR detection so that it could generate dc current and dc voltage for energy harvesting.